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Transcript

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0:01Who are the characters behind science? This is Science Behind the Glass, illuminating the human side. In this podcast, we unveil the human side of laboratories and science. Scientists share personal experiences and we discuss their meanings from different perspectives and fields of research. Welcome to Science Behind the Glass, Illuminating the Human Side, the podcast that breaks barriers, challenges the status quo, and uncovers the human stories behind science, policy, and the fight for our planet. Today, we explore the intersection of law, conservation, climate change, and rights, both human and non -human. Our guest, Professor Gary Myers, is a leading expert in environmental law, indigenous land rights, and natural resource governance. Currently based at James Cook University, with a career spanning the U.S. and Australia, he has shaped legal frameworks addressing some of today’s more pressing environmental changes.

1:01A JETIS doctor graduated from the University of Wisconsin -Madison, Professor Meyers has led groundbreaking legal research, including directing the Center for Mining, Energy, and Natural Resources Law. His work has strengthened indigenous land rights, redefined ecosystem protections, and expanded the public trust doctrine, a key legal tool now being used to make wildlife conservation and government responsible. Gary, welcome. Thank you very much. To start, can we talk a little bit about how the law has evolved to recognize the intrinsic values of ecosystems behind human use? Can you give us a little bit of a background of that? About the law and the recognition of treaties, generally speaking. Is that what you’re saying? Yes, so it’s like how the intrinsic value of ecosystems goes behind the human use. The interesting thing about treaties and international law in general is it’s distinct from the domestic legal systems that we live with because everything in international law depends upon consent as opposed to… domestic legal systems. There’s a parliament or a Congress, what have you. It passes laws. It doesn’t check with you to see if you want to be bound by the law. It just passes laws and you are bound by the law. And the same thing is true when the law is enforced. You know,

2:31if you disobey the law, if you speed or something and they pull you over and they give you a ticket, you’re expected to go to court. You don’t get to say, well, I’m too busy today. I’m not coming to court. But in international law, as I tell my students, the magic word is consent, consent, consent. Every treaty that a country signs is an act of consent to be bound by that law. And then if there’s a problem and you’re seen to be not complying with the treaty, again, there’s no police force. They’re not going to pull you up and say, well, here’s your ticket. Please come to the court. But even if you get taken to a court like the International Court of Justice, there’s the third consent. When you join the United Nations, you effectively agree to abide by the rules of the International Court of Justice.

3:28But if you don’t show up to argue your case, that’s okay. They can’t make you show up and argue your case. On the other hand, for example, there’s a case of Nicaragua versus the U.S., the U.S. mined Nicaraguan waters. And the U.S. said, well, I’m sorry, we’re not coming today. And the court ruled anyway. U.S., you’ve got to take those mines out of Nicaraguan waters. And the U.S. said, maybe, maybe not. So it’s consent, consent, consent. You’ve got to show up and you’re supposed to abide by the rules.

4:02It’s a very different sort of legal system than the one that, you know, that the three of us are used to. You know, where we did the law. It’s like a kind of kind of like a treaty, but at the same time, like a well, if I want to do it, I do it or not. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, the treaty is there. I mean, you look at currently you’ve got you’ve got a war in the Ukraine. You’ve got Russian invasion of Ukraine. You’ve got Israel’s effective retaliation. I don’t know what you want to call that situation in Gaza. Putin is facing two indictments from the International Criminal Court for not following the rules. Netanyahu is facing five indictments from the International Criminal Court. And yet, they’re still walking around free as birds. Netanyahu went to the U.S. Now, if the U.S. had been a member of the International Criminal Court, they would have been obliged to arrest him and turn him over to the jurisdiction of the court. But the U.S.

5:05isn’t a member of that treaty. And the same thing’s true with, you know, with Putin. If Putin and what’s his name, Rumpier, are supposed to get together at some point in time, you know, if that were to happen in the U.S., nothing. It limits, you know, neither Netanyahu or Putin, for that matter, can travel a whole lot these days. The only places they can travel are countries that are not members of the International Criminal Court, because those countries have to arrest them, whether they do or don’t. Again, it’s a question of whether you follow the rules. And if you don’t follow the rules, there’s really nobody there to, you know, hit you on the head and make you follow the rules. Yeah. And I guess that’s like an ecosystem level and nature level.

5:50raise their awareness of trying to protect our land is going to have the same issue. Yes. Because internationally, well, a country can protect one part of their land, for example, but the other one can say, well, I don’t follow the rules. So what are the tools that can be used to avoid this kind of issue? That’s an extremely difficult question. And the answer is none of us know.

6:21The standard answer, you know, if you’re teaching an introductory international law class or human rights law class or something like that, is this. Most countries follow most of the international rules most of the time because they want to be seen as good international citizens. You know, it’s very rare, for example, for the UN Security Council to… Send a peacekeeping force to another country because you’ve got to get basically a unanimous agreement in order to do that from the Security Council. And so that’s extremely rare. But if you look around, if you’ve got a relative in another country and you want to get on a plane and go see that relative, you can do that. When you get off, they’re going to take your passport. They’re going to stamp your passport and say, thank you very much for coming. If you want to go on to Amazon. and order a product from the US or the UK, you can do that. And you can pay with a card that you have in Australia.

7:23If you want to make a phone call to somebody in Kazakhstan, you can do that. And you couldn’t do any of those things if international law didn’t work because they all depend on international cooperation. So most of the time, most countries will follow. most of the rules. But beyond that, there’s very little that can be done to, I mean, there are sanctions, there are economics, there are huge economic sanctions against Russia. At the moment, it doesn’t seem to be making any difference. There are countries with sanctions against Israel. Again, it doesn’t seem to be making a lot of difference. So sometimes the answer is, we don’t know. Yeah, that is kind of terrifying, Gary, what you say, because I think that if people can’t trust that there there are mechanisms that make this kind of agreements or treaties binding to to those countries or those governments that sign those treaties well people stop believing in this kind of institutions and i think it’s pretty much the feeling that that is going around nowadays because well you see uh russia has you know the president has the these detention orders And he’s rather president as well, but nobody cares. They are here and there. Maybe they don’t go to some countries, but they decide pretty much which treaties they want to respect and which don’t. So the trust

8:54of most of the citizens, I believe, in the world is pretty much being undermined under this scenario. Oh, I agree. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s very difficult. I mean, we are so tied economically that it’s very difficult to get outside the economics and say, oh, look, you know, we don’t want your grain. We don’t want your beef. We don’t want this. We don’t want that. You know, you need to comply. And but those kinds of sanctions and like I say, the economic sanctions against Russia at the moment are very, very serious. And they managed to get around it. You know, they’re not buying, you know, who did they buy weapons from?

9:39Well, they bought weapons from China. Who’s helping them fight in the Ukraine? North Korea. Who else is supplying them with weapons? Well, interestingly enough, Israel is supplying Russia with weapons. Who’s supplying the weapons to Israel? Well, that’s the U.S. So, you know, it’s so complex and so complicated, and we are so intertwined with each other. that it’s very, very difficult to separate and really follow up on the sort of sanctions that would bring a country to heel.

10:12And then having said that, what have led to different changes in law that can make, I know that you mentioned before that there is a mutual agreement between countries, right? But then what have led to these bigger changes in law? If one country is bullying the rest of them, it’s like, no, we have to agree in this and it can continue happening. So what is the push to get a change, to make a change in these kind of cases? I think the standard answer is this. The United Nations itself is flawed in a very, very serious way.

11:01192, 193 members. Each one of them has an equal vote in the General Assembly. But the General Assembly votes, the recommendations of the declarations that the General Assembly makes are what they call soft law. It’s not binding. It’s a recommendation, a serious recommendation, or it’s a clear message that this is what most of the countries in the world believe ought to be occurring. But then you come to the Security Council and the Security Council comprised of 15 members. Five of them are permanent members. That’s the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia and China. And any one of them can veto any measure that comes to the Security Council. And that’s the huge that’s probably the single biggest flaw. And it was set up that way right after World War Two. by the powers that were effectively the allied powers that run that war. And they preserved for themselves that ability to veto. So, and during the Cold War, you know, whether it was, you know, you had Russia on one side, the U.S. on the other, and then Russia and China on one side. And, you know, it’s very, very difficult to get a unanimous vote. There are more peacekeeping forces today than there have ever been in the past. But, you know, they’re located in Africa, for God’s sake.

12:23and the Africans don’t have a permanent member, so it’s not as if they can jump in and veto anything. But during the height of the Cold War, there was only one peacekeeping operation that was sanctioned, and that was the Korean War. And the only reason that happened was because the Russian delegation went home on protest. That’s no way to run a railroad. So that single flaw of individual member veto across the Security Council, correct that, and that will probably go a long ways to solving many of the problems.

13:04But it’s not going to happen. Sorry. Sorry. Not going to happen. Pretty crazy because, well, trying to translate everything that we discussed so far to environmental things and this kind of stuff, I think that recently in Colombia we had the COP16 of biodiversity. And pretty much over there, the government said it was a huge success because they host the reunion and many leaders around the world went there. tried to figure out, but at the end of the convention, of the reunion, they didn’t get pretty much any advance on the protection of biodiversity. And these kind of things happen a lot in these international scenarios. I think because of some flaws, like those that you were discussing. So I don’t know if there is maybe other ways to try to advance in the laws that protect environment or that protect human rights that doesn’t involve this kind of international scenarios that maybe aren’t actually working out because of this kind of laws. Look, in environmental matters in particular, there are, I mean, there have been some huge successes. The, you know, the ozone treaty to the Montreal Protocol is a very, very significant

14:35success. But it occurred because DuPont discovered an alternative for chlorofluorocarbons. And, oh, the politics, the economics just sort of disappeared. We can do this. We don’t have to put CFCs in the air anymore. So the ozone convention is working. But the politics, you know, even the climate change stuff is not bad. You know, many countries are meeting their obligations under the Climate Change Convention, the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement. Many, many countries are doing so. Australia is attempting to do so, and it’s getting reasonably close. The U.S.

15:11was doing well. But then, you know, you’ve got a new administration and the new administration has renounced that agreement for the second time. Well, renounced it in 2018. Yeah, Biden rejoined in 2021 and and Rumpi version two has just pulled out of the Paris agreement again. So politics, huge potential constraint on the operation of international environmental law. Economics, again, a huge constraint. on the operation of international environmental law. But since 1975, every international environmental law treaty has contained a provision for financial and technical assistance to developing countries. That’s why, to some extent, they’re working. And then the science stuff gets in there.

16:05You know, everybody agreed that there was a problem with the ozone layer. You’ve got climate change deniers running all over the place saying, well, there’s no climate change. Or it’s not human -caused climate change. It’s very difficult. And then you get a convention. I mean, you mentioned biodiversity. You get a convention like the Biodiversity Convention. There’s one mandatory duty in the Biodiversity Convention. If you’re going to do something in country A and it’s going to have an impact on your neighboring country, country B, you have to do an environmental impact assessment and tell country B what you’re going to do. Country B has no option. You can do it. Or not do it.

16:46Country B may be able to negotiate something with you, but there’s no mandatory duty to mitigate your impacts. So the Biodiversity Convention is a tricky one. It’s there. It’s useful. But like I say, there’s very little in the way of mandatory duties in that convention. Talking about legal rights of biodiversity. Why do we focus on animals, for example, that in the case of Australian animals are property, but they don’t have legal rights? And to have legal rights, you also have legal obligations, right? When a kid or a child have legal rights, the obligations are different. Yeah. How does it work or how an animal or, for example, an ecosystem can get legal rights? Can you explain us a little bit?

17:40Well, they can. And I mean, we trace the I just I just had a student last year who did her honors in this area. And it related to indigenous people being able to name and provide legal rights to things like rivers and mountains, et cetera, et cetera. It began really with a with a piece. University professor Christopher Stone back in 1974, 75. wrote an article called Should Trees Have Standing? Since that time, there have been incidents of actually naming natural objects and giving them legal rights. There are two or three rivers, I think, in New Zealand that have legal standing, and they have guardians to protect them. There’s an old U.S. case sometime, I think, in the 1980s called Palila versus Hawaii. The palila is a bird. It was an endangered bird living in Hawaii. And guardians for that bird went to court to protect it from culling by, or I think it was timber harvesting, by Hawaiian authorities.

18:48So it can happen and it can work. You know, if you think about it, it’s not really particularly novel use of the legal system. Ships have legal rights. and corporations have legal rights. A ship can be sued. A ship can sue. A corporation can be sued, and a corporation can sue. A two -and -a -half -month -old baby has legal rights.

19:15Well, how do we know what a two -and -a -half -old baby wants? Well, we appoint a guardian, and it’s the guardian’s job to represent the baby’s best interests. So it’s not a huge leap, and I’m hoping that that… student of mine. She’s now doing a master’s. She’s doing a master’s degree, though, in English, and she’s writing fictional stories about indigenous people naming natural objects and seeing how that works. And I think it’s fantastic. You know, I’m glad she’s doing it. It will broaden the scope of, I think, people’s interest to look at it through fiction, for example, rather than thinking about it through the hard discipline of law. How this becomes a reality that an animal ecosystem have legal rights? So who can propose that? How can make it happen? Well, courts make it happen in certain instances when someone brings a lawsuit. I mean, the answer really is the same one as, you know, how do you know what a two and a half month old baby wants? Well, you go on. What is the best interest of that baby? That baby wants to live.

20:25It wants to be fed. It wants to be clothed. It wants to be warm. It wants to be loved. You or I, if we’re the guardian of that child, we can represent that child’s interest, his interest, her interest in a courtroom and argue for, you know, what is in the best interest. Now, think about a river, for example. What does a river want to do? Well, the river wants to flow. That’s what a river wants. It wants to live, too. It wants to do what rivers do. It wants to provide habitat for fish. It wants to provide water for wildlife who need to come to the river to have a drink. And if you somehow poison the river and the wildlife can’t come to the river and get a drink, well, that’s not in the river’s interest. I’m not perfect in any respect, and I might need to consult an ecologist, but, you know. We could get together, me, the lawyer, and him or her, the ecologist, and we could figure out how to go to court and say to the court, this is what this river wants. This is what this mountain wants. This mountain doesn’t want you to strip its trees. If you strip its trees, it has steep slopes. And what will happen when the rain comes? Well, that mountain will lose those steep slopes because they will flow into the river below. And when they flow into the river below, what will happen to that river? Well, that river is salmon habitat. And if you block the river, the salmon won’t be able to get up the river. I mean, it’s possible for the human to represent the interests of the non -human, I think. That is very interesting, Gary, and

21:56actually a good example of a different way to try to protect these big issues like environmental assets. and animals, as Linda said. Also, thinking about that, I think this represents a good advance in these environmental law things in respect of the international things, but there are problematics that are transnational problematics, like you were talking about the war, for example, for the human rights, and also we have things like the climate change and… What happened in these things that are transnational and that we know that the laws are getting a little behind? Why can we have this kind of legal figures that cover protection for things in a wider way, maybe geographically, when we talk about different nations? Well, you guys aren’t in the habit of asking easy questions, are you? And it’s not an easy question. I think countries are, to some extent, like humans. They tend to act in what they think is their best interest. And every treaty that a country enters into reduces, to some extent, their sovereignty.

23:19That is their capacity to do what they’ve always done, because they have to give it up. It’s like, you know, getting a group of kindergarten kids together and saying, OK, now you, little Johnny over there, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to play fair with little Mary over here. And Mary, you’re going to have to stop sticking your tongue out at little Billy because little Billy’s getting upset. At some point in time, and it may not happen right there in kindergarten, but at some point in time along the line, little Johnny, little Mary, little Billy, they all learn to play together nice. And that’s by giving up some of their sovereignty, what it is that they want to do. We’re relatively young in terms of international law governance. There wasn’t much in the way of public international law until the last century.

24:11We acted on the basis of custom. There was something called a just war. Well, a just war meant, well, yeah, you had a good cause and you thought you could win. That’s not international law. So much of our international law, most of our international environmental law is sort of, you know, post 1960s. We had the whaling convention back in the in the late 1930s, early 1940s. But that that was about it. We had a bit of customary international law. There was a case in the 19 in the 1930s called the Trail Smelter case. And Canada was doing something. Canada had a smelter by smelting iron or iron ore or whatever the heck it was. And the stuff was going up in the air, right? And out the smokestacks and then coming down on the forests in the Pacific Northwest.

25:01The U.S. took Canada to the international court and the court said, well, you can’t do that. You can’t do that. It’s the good neighbor principle, you know, the no harm principle. But most of our international law, our treaty law is like I say, it’s post 1960s. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species was 1973, I think it was. Ozone Convention was 1975, 1976. It took 30 years to negotiate the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. And once it was negotiated, it took another 10 years for people to sign up to it. So we’re really only dealing with, you know, in terms of international environmental law, 50 years. of trying to get people to cooperate together. And the same thing’s true with human rights law. And in fact, it’s less, 40 years for human rights law. And the International Criminal Court didn’t come into being until 2001, I think it was, or 2002. This international law stuff outside of the business area, you know, you being able to get on the plane, show your passport, get on a plane, get off the plane, show your passport, and go see Uncle Bill, you know. That’s, you know, that’s the easy stuff. But the human rights stuff, the environmental law stuff, that’s very, very different. Countries want to do what countries do. We have, for example, an almost recent case with climate change on the people forcing to migrate to other places because they

26:34live in islands. They start sinking. that, for example, we have and it hasn’t been considered. It’s like they mentioned recently in a paper that bears in the border with Mexico and U.S. were able to cross because of the wall. Yeah. And they don’t have these boundaries. No. So this is like a forced migration, but also what are the legal protections for these communities and also these animals that is playing into a role now with climate change and with displacement?

27:18Again, your questions get trickier and trickier. There’s no such thing, though, as an environmental right to refugee status. And every country knows that. If you want to be a refugee, you have to be in fear of – it’s not economic conditions. You can’t be an economic refugee. You can’t be an environmental refugee. You can’t be a refugee fleeing from – well, you can be a refugee fleeing from a country with a revolution if that revolution puts you in danger of persecution because of your religion or your race or your – social status, for example. That’s all that gets you refugee status. Because, again, and that convention isn’t particularly old either. That’s 1953. Again, a post -World War II convention in which it was trying to deal with huge numbers of people that had, in fact, been displaced during World War II. But there’s no such thing, I’m sorry, there’s no such thing as an economic refugee. It just doesn’t exist. It could. And countries do take large numbers of displaced persons because of both economic and, I suppose, political issues as well. But they’re not going to end up being refugees. I mean, we could change that. I’m not saying we couldn’t change the law. We could change the law and make it more possible for people

28:49to avoid those sorts of circumstances like climate change -induced. disasters, but we don’t at the present. Yeah, I understand that we are lacking of a framework, a legal framework in many problems that we are facing today that are very recent for the law and in general for human conception of these problems, the climate change, the pollution, the immigration, the human rights. It doesn’t have a framework because we are starting to realize pretty recently that there are pressing problems.

29:31And since they are very pressing, how do you think that we can move faster on creating these kind of frameworks locally and internationally? It’s like dealing with, you know, little Billy, Mary and Johnny. We get these countries together and we indicate to them that it’s in their interest to… take a concerted action, to give up some sovereignty, to make some sacrifices. And it depends, you know, on, in a sense, who’s in charge and, you know, are there any economic incentives for countries to cooperate better? Or are the economic incentives there for people to, countries, in effect, to act selfishly, to protect their own particular interests? I think most of the time we can make good arguments that cooperation is the better route to go. I’ll give you another example coming out of Australia. UNESCO, United Nations Education, Scientific, Cultural Organization, is the one that effectively manages compliance with the World Heritage Convention. We’ve got three sites here where I’m sitting. At the moment, I’ve got one site to this side, and I think that’s the wet tropics, the World Heritage Area. That way, I’ve got the Daintree World Heritage Area.

30:58And this way, I’ve got the Great Barrier Reef. So we’re surrounded by World Heritage. And so UNESCO came. It does its annual reports or not annual reports every five years, I think, for the UNESCO reports. And it comes and it recently came and it visited the Great Barrier Reef. And it was considered listing the Great Barrier Reef as in danger. And it’s in danger largely due to climate change. The problem is for Australia is that Australia produces less than 1 % of climate change gases. It could cut all of its climate change gas emissions tomorrow, and the Great Barrier Reef would be in no better position than it is today. There are a couple of things it could do. It could stop agriculture or prevent or curtail agricultural runoff. But really, the big problem is China burning a whole lot of coal, the U.S. burning a whole lot of coal, India burning a whole lot of coal. And, you know, it’s not their Great Barrier Reef. So we have to figure out a way to convince China, the U.S., India and the rest of the countries in the world that the Great Barrier Reef is, you know, is theirs in a sense. And it’s worth protecting. And if we can do that. you know, we’ll be better off.

32:14But as a species, we may just have a way to go before we actually get to that point of view. Maybe my daughter will get there. I don’t know. It’s like, for example, the International Treaty of the Protection of the Oceans. Yes. Some of the countries are on board, but then it’s like, as you said, if we think that… It’s a country thing that is not like a property. Yes. Like I know that’s belonging to someone else. Yes.

32:45To all of us. I think that it would be a better case to protect them. Oh, I think you’re right. And in fact, one of the things that I’m not sure the Oceans Treaty is live yet or not. I think that’s still trying to gather. Yeah. Yeah. But the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea reverses an old. adage about the commons property and what was commons property. The old version of the commons is that, well, nobody owns it, so nobody can regulate it. The new version in UN Convention on the Law of the Sea is common heritage of mankind, and it particularly applies to seabed resources. And it says, well, those resources are common heritage of mankind. That means everybody owns it. Everybody can regulate it. And that’s how Sea Shepherd operates. Whether you like the way that they operate or not, they operate on that basic principle. This is ours. It’s our future, our heritage. And so we can go out and protect it. So there’s some movement in that direction internationally. Now, I think Russia, China, and the U.S. have all objected to that section of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, but they’re complying with the rest of the provisions. And again, it may take some time.

34:03It’s just difficult. I mean, international law is difficult. Environmental law, even domestic environmental law is difficult. Getting states to cooperate back and forth in Australia, for example, with provision, getting them to sign up to restrictions on activities, whether it’s coal mining in Western Australia or coal mining in Queensland. Any place there’s money, it’s just difficult. policy choice? I think so, yeah.

34:36I think it can. And we have imposed rules in terms of conservation. Australia, for example, has endangered species protection legislation. The U.S. has endangered species protection legislation. Most Western countries have it. And that includes protection of habitat. Australia is engaged in buying back water rights to preserve Rivers in the Murray -Darling Basin, you know, stretch from Queensland through New South Wales, Victoria, and empty out into South Australia. Every mine that is built in Australia or, for example, in the U.S., I know, there are requirements that the land has to be returned to as close as possible.

35:27It’s what it was before it was mined. that may disperse species, but hopefully not. Hopefully they are protected. So, I mean, conservation has become a fairly binding, at least in the West, I would say conservation has become a fairly binding principle that you can’t undertake activities, development activities, without engaging in, at least at some level of conservation. But again…

35:56You know, money talks, and economics can sometimes. I won’t finish the money talks saying, but it does talk. And on occasion, maybe many occasions, the economics prevail over what’s actually beneficial for the environment. Yeah, because in mining, the impact that they cause and returning back to normal is not an animal. I know, I know, I know. It’s unrealistic. I have a question related with the Environmental Protection Act. I don’t know how it works here. It depends. Is it federal or is it by a state? Both. Okay, so it’s by choice?

36:43Look, every state has some form of an Environmental Protection Act. We’ll maybe set standards in terms of the amount of pollution that can be emitted from a stack or be in effluent leaving a factory. But also that provides, more importantly, for environmental impact assessment before a project gets started. And so every state has that. And then on top of that, there’s the Commonwealth Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. That act can be triggered by an activity in a state, even if that activity takes place on land that is not Commonwealth land, by what they call matters of national environmental significance.

37:30So any impact on a World Heritage Area is covered under the Environmental Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act. Any impact on, and most of it’s international stuff. So migratory bird treaties, covered. Ramsar, protected wetlands, covered. Species listed under the Commonwealth EPBCA, covered. Something about nukes and I think fracking is now covered as well. So any of those sorts of impacts or any impact in those areas is covered.

38:03And if the impacts are potentially significant, you have to have an assessment. And the assessment has to go to the state. And then from the state, it has to go to the feds. And the federal minister can impose conditions or decide not to approve the project altogether. And the same thing is available at the states when you don’t have commonwealth involvement. The states can do the same thing, impose conditions or say no to a project altogether.

38:35This is very, very interesting because, well, we talked many times over here that The laws exist and there are, as you said, in many Western countries, like robust environmental law. But always, as you also said, money talks. And there are ways to get around those laws. Many times, even for the corporations, they don’t even care to pay huge fines after they made the impact or whatever. Even then, they can pay the fines or anything. Where are we failing there? Are we being too soft on enforcing these laws? Maybe the penalizations for not complying with these laws? Or maybe we are failing all the way in the economic system. There is a way to change this. Because, you know, everything seems to reduce. to is economics and politics, because the law is like a subject of those two in a way.

39:46Yeah, it is. It is. Look, I do think that in countries like Australia or the US or Canada, any number of the Germany, France, UK, any of the big Western countries, their environmental laws are pretty good. And it’s not necessarily easy to get around them. But it can be done. And in some instances, you know, that getting done is actually facilitated by the political system. Back before I left the U.S., along with the National Wildlife Federation, we took the United States Forest Service to the federal court because they had failed to pair an environmental impact assessment on timber logging. This was in the Siusla National Forest in the state of Oregon. And we won. And they appealed. And we went to the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. And we won again. What happened after that? Well, after that, one of the Oregon representatives during the budget hearings introduced a measure that said, well, for the purposes of the National Environmental Policy Act, we will. confirmed now that the Siusla National Forest does not need any more environmental impact statements. And they put it on the budget.

41:06That was a budget rider. Everybody’s interested in getting the budget passed. And it passed. So we lost. We didn’t lose in court, but we lost in Congress. And it happens. And that’s another one of, you know, the money talks. I’ll say it again. You know, we’re young. We’re still growing into all this stuff. My big hope is that we manage to somehow grow into it before we’ve lost a planet that’s capable actually of supporting us and a whole lot of other species. I mean, if you look at Western Europe, 95 % of their natural species are gone. It’s gone. The U.S., Australia, a little bit better. Much of the natural world is just gone. Yeah, 70 % or even more. Yeah, yeah, gone. Yes. And then… Also, you mentioned that you work a lot in the public trust doctrine.

42:00That is a legal principle that holds that specific natural resources like air, water, and shorelines. Yes. And are held in trust in the government for a public use and benefit. That’s true. How does your work expand the public trust doctrine behind this traditional scope? turning into a legal obligation for governments to protect entire ecosystems biodiversity and even specific species threatened that just waterways and public lands well it’s interesting outside of common law countries like you know like the uk canada new zealand the us etc etc i don’t know if there’s a There is what you would call a public trust, but there’s an old public trust doctrine that operates in the UK and that operates here in Australia and that operates to great effect in the US. It does require leaving those areas. It doesn’t work so much on air, but it does on water. Navigation, fishing, wildlife protection, habitat protection that depends upon water. That’s reasonably well covered in the US. We’re getting there in Australia.

43:12I’ve referred to the public trust doctrine in Australia as a sort of a submerged doctrine. It needs to come out of the water and get a bit more amphibious. But yeah, it’s there. But again, there’s an old paper. Garrett Hardin wrote a piece called The Tragedy of the Commons. And the tragedy of the commons is that with common property, let’s say you’ve got an area, Rose in England, you’ve got a parkland, a reserve or something or other, and everybody can graze their sheep there. I can graze my sheep. You can graze your sheep. He can graze his sheep.

43:45Is there any incentive for us to mitigate and cut back on the grazing so that there will be enough grass there so that we can graze our sheep next year? No, there is not. What’s the incentive? The incentive is for me to get my sheep to that area as quickly as possible and they can eat as much of it as possible so I can make as much money. You don’t count. That’s the tragedy of the commons. you need to flip that notion that the commons doesn’t belong to anybody, so nobody can do anything about it. Two, the commons belong to everybody. So we all have a role to play in preserving the commons. That’s, you know, a matter of education and a matter of time, I think. Today, like kind of common spirit, I saw that that was like internationally, that the spirit maybe at the end of the 90s, beginning of this century.

44:39Because these, like, first world countries, so to speak, the US and Europe and north of Europe, they have policies and politics addressing, like, assistance to countries to protect biodiversity, to protect indigenous people, this kind of policy. But today, the political climate, it seems to be changing because… These countries are turning to a protectionism politics and to these kind of things we see in the recent U.S. elections and in many countries. Do you think there is place nowadays to evolve this kind of community sense in the country? Because it seems like it’s essential to advance on these matters. Yeah, I do. think so. Again, I think it will take more time, maybe considerably more time, but I certainly did a piece back in the early 1990s looking at the question of commons and made the argument that the Amazon rainforest produces 50, 60 percent of the oxygen that we breathe. We breathe it here. We breathe it in the U.S. We breathe it where you are. And so we need to be treating the Amazon rainforest, in a sense, as a commons.

46:12Well, how do we treat it as a commons if Brazil and other countries want to harvest timber out of the rainforest? Well, the only way to treat it as a commons is for us to get together and say, look, we, the rest of the world, we’re breathing that air. We need that air. We will pay you not to harvest the timber. So that we keep a resource that provides all of us around the world with oxygen. But again, it’s a matter of, you know, you give up a bit of sovereignty. You recognize that, you know, acting on behalf of all of us is better than acting selfishly. You know, maybe we’ll get there. Maybe. I’d like to think we get there. I hope so. Well, I mean, and that’s a difficult question. You talk about environmental law, you talk about international law, you talk about human rights law. The answers are just not easy. I mean, for me, they’re easy. I know what I would do if I was in charge. But, you know, I’m not in charge. Well, no, we don’t want to hope that I’m in charge. What we’re going to hope for is that the rest of the country sort of come together and get smart and work with each other. Yes. Thank you very much, Gary, for your time. Oh, you’re welcome. Enlighten us.

47:30Tell us the truth. I don’t know. Well, it was fun. Thank you very much for the invitation. As we bring this conversation to a close, one thing becomes clear. Law is not static. It is a living, evolving framework that both reflects and shapes our values. To Professor Gary Mayer’s insights, we reminded that the battle for environmental justice, indigenous land rights, and the recognition of nature’s intrinsic worth is not merely a legal debate. He’s a human one. Science Behind the Glass is independently produced and edited by your hosts Linda Hernández and Daniel Esqueda.

48:05With the valuable support of our dedicated technical director Rafael Giordano and the original music by our colleague and friend Bernardo Aguilar. Stay connected on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn and TikTok. And visit our website for updates and stories. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues to amplify these essential narratives. If you are moved by our mission, we invite you to make a contribution via PayPal. Simply click the Support Us button on our website. Your support is vital for keeping this project thriving. If this conversation sparked something new, keep asking questions.

48:42Challenge the boundaries. And remember, the law can be a barrier, but it can also be a bridge. Let’s keep building. Until next time.